


The Mistake

by dragoninatrenchcoat



Series: Out of the Nick of Time [9]
Category: Forever (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, cw suicide mention, despite what you may be led to believe this is not a casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29567097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragoninatrenchcoat/pseuds/dragoninatrenchcoat
Summary: What if Jo got to the parking structure just a few seconds later?In Episode 12, The Wolves of Deep Brooklyn, Henry stared down a speeding vehicle twice in the same episode. This is an examination of the second instance: what would have happened if Jo had been just a few moments too late to stop Oliver from running over Henry in the parking structure.Disclaimer: this is not guaranteed to be a reveal. Like all OotNoT stories, I recommend rewatching the correlating episode just before reading the story, but that’s certainly not required.
Relationships: Jo Martinez & Henry Morgan, Mike Hanson & Jo Martinez
Series: Out of the Nick of Time [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1880338
Comments: 8
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

Henry stepped out into the parking garage. There was no guarantee that Oliver had run here, but it was odd that an elevator had been dispatched to the second parking floor when the law enforcement vehicles had all been parked on the first. And he was not going to allow Oliver Clarion to get away with what he’d done. He peered between the cars, the hollow silence of the stale air, searching for movement in the shadows. But before long, movement found him.

Sound, rather. The unmistakable purr of a revving engine. For a moment, Henry worried that Oliver was already well on his way to escape; equipped with an automobile, there was nothing Henry would be able to do to stop him. But then he found the car standing still, facing him, staring him down with those bright, even headlamps. Almost before he had a chance to register the situation, the car screeched into motion, racing toward him. Playing chicken.

Now, this was a fight he could win.

Henry found Oliver’s eyes through the windshield. Determined. But Henry was more so; he centered himself just enough in the aisle so that the car wouldn’t have room to skirt around him, but would also hit the concrete column if aimed dead-on. He remembered the disquieting motto that Oliver had inspired his employees to chant.

_“Kill!”_

_“Kill!”_

_“Kill!”_

_“Or?”_

_“Be killed!”_

As he stared, unblinking, into Oliver’s eyes--with more and more detail as the car drew closer--Henry wondered if that chant was echoing through his mind as well.

Then the car struck. At its speed, the pain couldn’t register right away; the momentum cast him forward, and he crashed headfirst through the-

#

Henry came, disoriented, to his senses. Floating. Sometimes he felt the aftershocks of a far-reaching pain, but this time he felt only the frigid cold and the burn in his lungs. This death must have been relatively quick, and therefore painless. A pleasant surprise. His experiences with getting run over by cars hadn’t trended so leniently in the past.

He swam upward and burst through the surface, caught his breath. A quiet night; no one had spotted him yet in the dark water. Somewhere deep in that ever-growing city, FBI agents overturned desks amid scrambling workers, and Oliver had crashed his vehicle into the column behind Henry. Possibly sustaining injuries himself.

He’d done it. He’d prevented Oliver from getting away.

Then why didn’t it feel like a victory?

Henry swam toward shore; he was mostly numb, but reaching the bank of the East River was rote muscle memory.

#

Jo raced out from the elevator, weapon drawn, toward the sound of the crash. She aimed her weapon at the vehicle, but it and its driver weren’t moving; Oliver’s head pressed through a now-deflated airbag against the horn, producing a loud, endless drone. He’d crashed into a support column and his car had warped--

\--around someone wearing an expensive coat.

“Henry!” Jo holstered her gun and sprinted to his side, pulling out her radio. He lay disheveled on the crumpled hood of the car, half-buried in the windshield, blood pouring in rivulets along the crash pattern of the metal.

She called for first aid as she checked his pulse. Slow. Slowing. Was he breathing? He wasn’t moving, his eyes half-closed and glassy. Unconscious. She needed to stop the bleeding, but his wounds were hidden somewhere in his own crumpled heap; there must have been one on his head, dark blood streaming out onto the car’s console, but his hair was curly and matted, hiding the source.

She couldn’t find his pulse.

In a panic, Jo dragged him off of the hood. Injured people shouldn’t be moved, but he needed chest compressions, and she couldn’t twist him face-up against the jagged remains of the metal. With a strength she didn’t know she’d had, Jo leveraged Henry into her arms and fell back onto the concrete empty-handed.

Blinking, she stood up to try again with a better grip, but he wasn’t... there anymore. The car wrapped around the column, the endless horn echoed through the structure. No blood. Not on the hood, nor the console, nor her own hands. The only remaining sign of Henry’s impact was the hole in the windshield.

When the EMTs arrived, they rushed to Oliver’s side. One of the FBI agents found them there and remarked on Oliver’s stupidity.

Jo didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. The words wouldn’t form in her mouth. Once Oliver was in the ambulance, and officially in police custody, she left the scene.

#

“You interrupted our victory dinner,” Abe complained as Henry toweled off in the car beside him.

“An overeager celebration. What if Oliver had gotten away? What if he’d come up with some new piece of evidence to exonerate himself?”

“Oh, I know you and Jo better than that. I knew you wouldn’t let him weasel out.” 

Henry pulled on a sweater. “It was close this time.”

“Ah-ha!” Abe lifted one finger with a grin. “That means you did catch him, and I was right to put my faith in you.”

“Abraham-”

“I’m in a good mood tonight, you’re not going to talk me out of it. Do you need me to take you anywhere, or are we just going home?”

“Oh, home, please, Abe.” He said it with a long sigh, leaving the towel around his neck. “I am exhausted. I’ll come up with some excuse for Jo tomorrow. Right now, all I want is a hot meal and a quiet night.”

Abe turned around to reverse the car from the lot. “I’ve got the hot meal lined up for you, but a quiet night is out of the question. You’ll just have to celebrate with the rest of us.”

Henry chuckled. “Yes, all right, Abe. However, I will need to change when we arrive.”

Abe rolled his eyes. “No one cares how you dress when it’s just a few friends having dinner at your own house.”

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look presentable.”

“No, but jeez, Henry. At least you stopped changing up your look every evening.”

They laughed, and it felt so good just to laugh together.

#

Jo sat alone in her car, and started to cry.

She didn’t cry easily, and she didn’t cry often. She couldn’t exactly be sure why she was crying now; she didn’t even know what the hell had happened. Or was that why, in and of itself?

Henry had died. Broken bones, his head through a car windshield, and glassy, half-closed eyes. And then he’d... stopped... being there. No one else had seen him; they’d all acted like nothing had happened, because as far as they were aware, nothing _had_ happened. Oliver, in trying to get away, had crashed headfirst into a concrete pillar. Without Jo’s input, the scene had decided itself, like reality was trying to wipe away what she’d seen.

But she wouldn’t let it. She had seen it. An entire body--an entire person--disappearing, like he’d never been there to begin with.

Would he walk into work the next day, like nothing had happened at all? Or was he gone forever? She felt like she’d seen something she hadn’t been meant to see, like pulling the curtain back to reveal façades from a different scene, and the longer she spent thinking about it, the more frustrated she became that it made no sense at all.

Henry had died. She saw it happen. But before she could let herself process it, before she could decide what course to take, she needed to know what the hell had happened after that.

The parking garage had cameras. She’d requisition them tomorrow. They needed to see what had happened to Oliver, anyway, if he’d really just run into a column in his own haste to escape, to have it on file for the court.

In the meantime, she needed to...

No, she couldn’t sleep. She’d go back to the station instead.

#

“Jo.” It was Mike’s voice, a gentle nudge on her shoulder.

She lifted her head from the hard surface of her desk, unsuccessfully pillowed by a folder of case files. Mike stood over her, offering a mug of black coffee.

“Morning,” he said. “I know you have a tendency to push yourself too hard, but you usually at least take the night off after you catch the guy.”

Jo sat up and accepted the mug. The bullpen was empty. “You’re here early,” she remarked, feeling like she’d forgotten something.

“You’re here late,” he countered. “I know you keep a spare shirt in your drawer, you might want to change before anyone else comes in.”

She took a long, cleansing drink. “Yeah. Thank you, Mike. I was just...”

Henry’s body, a heap on the hood of Oliver’s car. His glassy, half-closed eyes. Somehow, it felt even less like a dream now than it had last night. Still impossible and insane, but maybe not outright a hallucination.

Henry was dead.

Mike leaned into her field of view. “Jo? You alright?”

She couldn’t answer him. She’d put in the request for the footage last night. What else could she do? What else could be done?

She could change her shirt.

Jo set down the coffee, dug her spare blouse out of the bottom drawer, offered Mike a smile that felt fake and looked fake in his eyes, and left for the women’s room.

She was going to have to take action soon. Something was going to have to happen; Henry had died, and she was the only one who knew about it. But she had no idea what that action would be, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to figure it out until she got her hands on that footage.

#

Henry studied the cadaver before him. The simplicity of her death shone brightly in the contusion on her temple, the bruising along her side and back, the white substance clotting in her hair. The easy answer swum in his vision, making it difficult to concentrate, to double check, as he always did. Luckily, he had an assistant.

“Definitely conditioner,” said Lucas, wafting his own gloved hand under his nose. “Peach scented. It’s really slathered on there.”

“So the water must have shut off before she wound up on the floor. Otherwise, it would have rinsed off, at least more than it clearly has been, in the interim between death and discovery.”

“Oooh. Yeah, good point. Does that mean anything? Could she have shut off the water mid-shower for some reason?”

The poor woman could easily have slipped--the wedge of soap caught beneath her toenail--and hit her head against the shower spigot, shutting off the water by accident. Her contusion could match that necessarily sharp angle.

Or, she could have shut off the water herself to facilitate speaking with someone. They could have grabbed her by the shoulder and shoved her against the wall.

Henry shook his head. Occam’s razor. Yes, it was conceivable, but the impact bruises likely would have been slightly different. There were no other wounds or bruising on the body that would indicate that kind of a struggle.

Lucas peered at him. “Dr. Morgan?”

Henry took a deep breath, nodded. Every extra moment that a body sat at room temperature was a moment wasted. “Signs so far point toward accidental death. I’m not signing off on that just yet, however. Let’s put her away for now until we get the toxicology report.”

“Yes, sir.” With that, Lucas expeditiously organized their station and wheeled the cadaver away. He was, under all that undue excitability, a good worker.

Henry took the incomplete report back into his office, hung his white coat by the door. It wasn’t often that one of his own deaths distracted him so strongly, but something felt odd about last night’s collision. Like it was incomplete. He’d told himself that he’d done what he’d set out to do: stopped Oliver from getting away. He certainly would have heard from Jo by now if that hadn’t been the case.

But was that really why he’d stepped in front of the car?

 _Suicidal tendencies._ The phrase came to him from nowhere, sending a chill down his spine. But he was immortal, so such a thing would be more or less meaningless; and beyond that, didn’t he already know he could technically be called suicidal? He was actively hunting down his own death, for God’s sake. If he were easily able to kill himself, he’d have accomplished it long before now.

His mind wandered necessarily into that dark time after Abigail’s disappearance, so he sat down at his desk and forced himself to focus on the report before him.

#

Jo was sitting at her desk and staring at her paperwork when the garage footage came through. She immediately dropped the pretense that she was getting anything done and pored through it herself.

But there was nothing. None of the camera angles showed the actual crash; one of them had a flare of headlights at the appropriate moment, but that was all.

She had no answers. No plan. She’d been so certain that she’d be able to come up with something after seeing the footage, but she’d learned nothing.

She needed to finish her paperwork. 

She needed to do something. Henry was dead, and no one knew it yet. But what could she possibly do?

Would Abe understand what had happened? Why would he? Would it be irresponsible to tell him what happened, before she understood it herself? Would it be irresponsible to delay telling him any longer?

Was there anyone she could tell who would actually give her the benefit of the doubt?

“Martinez.”

Jo looked up to see Reece standing in the doorway to her office. Unable to do anything else, she stood and reported to her lieutenant.

As she closed the door after her, Reece took a seat and said, “I heard you have a suspect in custody.”

Jo stood straight, hands behind her. “Yes, sir. Oliver crashed his car fleeing the scene.”

“So Oliver Clarion killed Jason Fox?”

She nodded, and the details of the case came out of her. Succinct and matter-of-fact. On some level, she was surprised she remembered it; she hadn’t spent a moment’s thought on the case since Oliver had been taken to the hospital.

Reece watched her with that piercing look. “Nice work, Jo. You and Morgan are quite the team.”

Jo’s breath caught.

Reece frowned. “What is it?”

_Henry is dead._

_Say it._

_But is that what happened? No one else was there. It wasn’t caught on camera. Not a drop of blood left behind._

Jo opened her mouth and said, “Yeah. We’re a team.”

_Did I just lie to my lieutenant?_

Reece’s eyes narrowed. “And Henry hasn't behaved in any way out of the ordinary?”

A bloody, crumpled heap that vanished from between her fingers. A strange hole left in the windshield.

She opened her mouth again, and this time, a half-truth came out.

“Actually, I haven’t seen him at all since Oliver tried to escape.”

Reece leaned back in her seat. “He hasn’t come back to work?”

“I don’t think so.” _Another lie._ Why couldn’t she open her mouth and tell Reece the truth?

“Maybe he isn’t ready. I understand this case was close to Abe. It could’ve been a one-time thing. Be patient with him, Jo.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In the meantime, you have a new case. A body was just now called in.” She picked up a note and handed it to Jo, who accepted it wordlessly, nodded, and left.

She needed to do something about Henry, but she couldn’t let a dead body sit in the open air, either.

She put on her coat, double-checked her gun and badge, and left.

#

Henry was holding an esophagus up to the light, both he and Lucas squinting to inspect a faint residue along its surface, when Detective Hanson’s voice cut the air.

“Hey, Doc, I- what the hell are you doing?”

Henry glanced up, allowed a small grin. “I am merely confirming a hypothesis regarding Ms. Zhao’s esophageal dysphagia. To what do I owe the pleasure, Detective?”

“Is this esophageal... whatsit really time sensitive?” Hanson didn’t look concerned, only confused.

“Only insofar as every case is important.” Henry, nonplussed, handed the esophagus carefully back to Lucas--who continued to inspect it, not seeming to notice the interruption.

“Are you and Jo fighting or something?”

Henry frowned at that. “No. Is something amiss?”

Hanson shook his head. “I don’t know. I doubt it. She was acting kind of weird this morning, like something’s wrong. I tried to ask her about it, but she shrugged me off. Maybe you’d do better.”

“Strange. I’ll visit her desk once I’ve completed my work with Ms. Zhao.” He motioned to Lucas for his knife.

“Nah, that’s the thing, Henry. She headed out to a crime scene without you.”

Henry looked up again, even as the weight of the handle settled familiarly into his palm.

Hanson shrugged. “Told you. Acting kind of weird. Forensics hasn’t arrived yet, maybe there’s still time for that to include you.”

“Maybe,” Henry echoed. Had he done something to offend her? He’d given Jason’s mysterious key to Abe, rather than keeping it as evidence. But she’d shown nothing other than frustration over that, which had seemed mollified once he’d apologized and promised not to do the like again. Had she hidden her true anger? Why? He’d thought they’d reached a place where they could be open with one another--at least, as open as circumstances allowed.

“Dr. Morgan?” Lucas asked, bringing Henry back to the present.

“Yes,” he said to both of them, and then to Hanson, “I’ll do so. Lucas, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Righty-ho, Doc,” said Lucas, and began studiously cleaning the station again.

Hanson said, “The body’s smack in the middle of the Great Lawn. Cut into three pieces. Can’t miss the thing. I’ll see you there.”

Henry carefully removed his gloves and labcoat as Hanson left, glancing habitually over Ms. Zhao’s body as he did so, but he didn’t pick up anything new. 

Was Jo mad at him for running away last night? For not apologizing first thing in the morning? Or had she simply thought him busy with his own work, and he was reading too much into it?

“Don’t worry about Ms. Zhao,” said Lucas. “I’ve got her. You go do your Sherlock thing.”

“It is not a ‘Sherlock thing’, it is my job.”

“Sure, because every M.E. moonlights as a ninja crime fighter.” He started wheeling the body away.

Henry paused halfway through putting on his coat. “Lucas, I’m not a ninja.”

“Ex-marine?” Lucas guessed hopelessly. “I figure you’ve got to have some secret skills for Detective Martinez to want to take you along all the time.”

“No, there’s no secret. I’m just a doctor.”

“Okay,” Lucas said as he disappeared onto the freezer. Henry shook his head, grabbed his scarf, and left. 

#

The body was splayed spreadeagle on the crisp green grass just next to a baseball diamond, each arm cut off at the shoulder but arranged as if they hadn’t been. Jo stared at it, standing back a few feet, as though trying to imagine the scene.

There was blood beneath the body, but no drag marks or other mars to the curated lawn. That meant the dismemberment had likely happened here, as opposed to a complete staging.

That was as far as her thoughts went.

She tried to force herself into the present, into this new case, but she kept pulling back to last night. Henry’s face, slack and glassy-eyed, the blood beading along the dents in the hood of Oliver’s car. 

Why hadn’t she told anyone he was dead? She’d tried to tell Reece, tried to pick up the phone to call Abe, or grab her things to head over to the shop and tell him directly. But each time she tried, she’d locked up. Henry had _vanished--_ no body. No way for anyone to verify her story. No way to tell the story that didn’t sound at least partly made-up or hallucinated.

The victim was a young man. Late teens. He was wearing a flimsy baseball jersey, like an overused PE uniform. Mike was here, talking to the witnesses who’d called it in, a couple of teen girls just a bit younger than the victim.

They’d set up a perimeter but still people gawked from behind the lines. There was no way to stop them; this was Central Park, and an empty baseball diamond that couldn’t be used. The yellow caution tape was little more than a beacon of spectacle.

Even now, she saw someone in a coat duck under the tape while Officer Rutger’s back was turned. She opened her mouth to tell him off, but her breath caught in her throat.

Henry sauntered toward her, fixing his scarf.

She couldn’t move, or make a noise, as he flashed her a smile and came to a stop beside her.

“Hello, Jo,” he said, gesturing to the body. “Mind if I take a look?”


	2. Chapter 2

The way Jo stared made it very clear that Henry had specifically not been invited for a reason. He withdrew his hand, tense. It’d been a mistake to come here. What had he done to make her distrust him so? How could he-

“Henry,” said Jo, loud and matter-of-fact. Both eyes wide, staring into his.

He cleared his throat. “Yes?”

She glanced between his eyes, scanned down the length of his body. If she was only surprised that he’d showed up without invitation, then this was a bit of an overreaction, wasn’t it? Particularly when she reached out and felt his shoulders, ran a hand over his scarf, even pressed her palm against his cheek. Mike glanced toward them, and Henry saw him frown in confusion over Jo’s shoulder.

Henry nervously pushed her hands away. “Yes, it’s me, Jo. What is it?”

“Henry, you’re... oh, my God. You’re alive?”

His blood ran cold.

“How is that possible?” she continued. “Henry, I saw you bleed out on the hood of Oliver’s car-”

He laughed. Loudly. It was the wrong thing to do, he could see that in her eyes, but he absolutely needed her to stop talking immediately when they were _ oh so surrounded _ by all sorts of onlookers.

Dear God, she’d _ seen him? _

“Oh, you fell for that old trick,” he said, barely aware of his own words. Mike sauntered toward them, the witnesses he’d been questioning ducking in toward one another.

“That ‘old trick’?” She blinked at him. “Henry, I had you _ in my hands-” _

“Yes, of course you did, Jo, but as you can see, we have business to attend to.” He gestured desperately to the poor soul who’d been sawed into three, a smile plastered on his face.

She spoke right over him. “How did you- how could that be possible, Henry? I know what I saw. I saw you-”

“Perhaps now is not the time to reminisce about what happened last night, don’t you think? Not now, here,  _ in front of everyone _ , and all the while there’s a grisly murder to solve.”

She paused and finally registered his tone, his strained smile. She blinked and regarded him, like she hadn’t seen him properly before. She glanced over to Mike, who’d stopped beside them with an eyebrow raised, and Officer Tiernan, who’d been watching with a barely-suppressed smirk but glanced away when she met his gaze. 

The forensics van unleashed a small crowd of workers who spread out into the crime scene, surrounding them. Jo closed her mouth and Henry’s relief came out in a shaking breath.

Jo saw him die. And he’d had no idea. He must have fallen unconscious for at least a few moments before death; how many times might the same thing have happened before? How many secret witnesses might still be hiding out there?

“Something happen last night?” Mike asked point-blank, like he were missing out on a joke.

“Nothing at all,” said Henry. “We lost track of one another while hunting down Oliver Clarion. My old habit of running off when explicitly told otherwise.”

That seemed to mollify Mike, but Jo watched him like he were a complete stranger, and that chilled him more than the murmurs of the police workers surrounding them.

He paused, turned away, and squatted down beside the body, feeling her stupefied gaze on his back.

#

Jo could do nothing but watch Henry inspect the body, poring over it, acting his usual self.

Henry was  _ alive. _

He was alive. It really was like she’d seen something wrong last night, something incorrect, and the world had swept in to fix its mistake around her. Oliver had rammed into a concrete pillar while attempting to escape; the hood of his car had crumpled around it, and nothing else; if there was a hole in his windshield, then it was a curiosity, but not worth dwelling upon; and above all, there had been no death, no blood, no body. See? Henry couldn’t have died--here he was, like he always would have been.

But Henry knew about it. He’d made that clear. There  _ was _ something going on, and he knew exactly what. 

Henry stood up and gestured to the body. “The victim’s arms had been removed postmortem. The pools of blood beneath each appendage would have been much larger had the dismemberment occurred while alive, and then there is the position of the body. No. I do believe he was murdered here--there are strangulation marks, just there, and signs of asphyxiation--and the shoulders were cut into, perhaps even partially removed, before a blunt force attack to the head finally took the poor soul’s life.”

Jo barely heard a word of it.

In her silence, Henry cleared his throat, then continued. “One the deed was done, the killer then proceeded to remove the arms through the use of a long, thick, serrated blade. Perhaps a bone saw, or handsaw. The body was then posed and left for discovery.”

She stared at him, at his expression, his hair, which had been matted with blood last night.

His smile fell and he stepped forward again. “Perhaps we should step aside for a moment, Jo?”

He said it more quietly than she expected, his tongue caught between his teeth.

He was alive.

He swallowed nervously. “In private?”

Jo glanced around them, at the forensics crew, the officers, the onlookers, and Mike, who still stood just next to her.

When she met his eyes, Mike shrugged and said, “I can hold down the fort for a few minutes. Doc, if you’re done with the body, I’ll have it sent back to the lab.”

Henry nodded. “Yes, the sooner we get our poor victim into a freezer, the better.”

Mike turned away.

Jo grabbed Henry by the forearm and dragged him away from the crime scene. She didn’t let him go; she felt on some level that he’d vanish the moment she turned her back, so she held firm, ensuring that it wouldn’t happen again.

Although he had been in her arms, last time. Last night. She’d been grabbing him, pulling him, desperate with the fear of his death, and he’d vanished despite that.

“Jo,” said Henry, his voice jagged through his uneven steps as she dragged him in a fast walk toward her car.

She spoke loudly, focused on her destination. “You don’t want to talk in front of people? Then let’s get away from people.”

“Lead the way, then,” he said from behind her, as though they weren’t halfway there already.

#

Henry hesitated outside Jo’s car, but she held the passenger door open and waved him in, fixing him with a strange new stern expression. He had no choice but to oblige.

Jo had seen him die, and he hadn’t known about it. He’d been careless-- _ suicidal, _ his mind whispered to him--and this was the price.

She rounded the car and slid into the driver’s seat, shut the door behind her. She didn’t make any other motions to strap herself in or start the engine; she merely placed her hands on the wheel and breathed firmly, a cadence that felt deliberately even.

“You died,” she said. The very word he’d stopped her from uttering out in the crowded field. She looked across at him, as though daring him to contradict her.

He wanted to. He desperately wanted to. But what could he say? There was nothing he could say, no lie he could cook up, that could possibly convince her that she was somehow mistaken. She said he’d died  _ in her arms.  _ There was no way around it.

“You died,” she repeated, a little louder.

Henry nodded, despite himself. 

She stared at him again, the same way she had at the crime scene. Like she’d never laid her eyes on him before.

He swallowed. “I realized that Oliver was making his escape via the parking garage, perhaps realizing you’d have sent officers to his helipad. He was in his car by the time I found him, engine on, practically escaped already. So I stood in his path. I should, I realize now, have put together that a man who made all that talk about playing chicken--a man, no less, who had already murdered someone--wouldn’t exactly flinch from a fight where his were the greater odds. Let it merely be said that neither one of us backed down.”

“You _ died.” _

“And Mr. Clarion was apprehended. Some might call it a lose-lose.”

“Henry, you  _ died!” _

He met her eyes. “Yes, Jo, I did. And yet I’m alive now.”

She blinked, shook her head, and turned as fully toward him as her seat allowed. “Okay. You’re going to tell me everything you know about this, and you’re going to tell me right now.”

His heart thrummed in his chest. Breaths heavy, sweat on the back of his neck. Abe had insisted that it was time to tell Jo; Henry had vehemently disagreed, but it seemed that fate had made the decision for him.

No, not fate. It was his own self-sabotage that had landed him here.

_ Suicidal tendencies, _ he realized with a start.  _ This is what that means for me. _

“Henry?” Jo prompted.

He swallowed. “Jo, I’m afraid the answer is very simple. I...” he glanced out through the windows to confirm that no one was standing anywhere near the vehicle. “I cannot die.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is what it sounds like. I cannot die. Rather, it doesn’t last. Each time I die, I come back promptly in the nearest large body of water. If you saw me die, then you saw my body disappear, didn’t you?”

She nodded, surprised.

A dire thought came to him. “Did anyone else see me die last night? Was there anyone else there with you, anyone who could possibly have seen it?”

“What? No, I don’t think so.”

“Please, Jo. I need you to be certain.”

She paused. “No. If they had, I would have heard about it.”

He sat back into his seat, hand on his forehead. “Oh, thank God.”

“Why?”

“If it’s just you... Abe has been insisting that I tell you the truth, lately. Especially since...”

Clark Walker bleeding out on his basement floor. The image was as sudden as it was unwelcome.

He shoved it aside. “If anyone else had seen it, I would be forced to run, to start over somewhere else. I’d like to avoid that for as long as possible. I have come to like working alongside you, and if my immortality came to light, that would be the end of it. One way or another.”

“Henry, you’re actually telling me that you’re  _ immortal?” _

He steeled himself, and met her eyes again. “Yes.”

She kept his gaze. “That’s what I saw last night.”

“Yes.” He paused, tongue between his teeth. “Jo, I need you to understand that this is a secret. I need you to swear to me that you’ll tell no one.”

She stared, but this time he thought she wasn’t seeing him at all. She was thinking back to all the time they’d known one another, all the things he’d done. He wondered whether he should interrupt or let her think; in his long centuries, this was the one thing with which he was absolutely inexperienced.

“You went down with him,” she finally said.

“I’m sorry, with whom?”

“On our very first case. The poisoner who threw himself off the roof. I thought I heard you get shot; I thought I saw you fall together. That happened, didn’t it?”

Henry nodded. “Yes. I... I am sorry for lying, Jo. I am sorry that, had you not seen me, I most assuredly would have lied to you about what happened last night. I’m sorry that I couldn’t come to trust you with this on my own, and needed some contrivance of fate to force it upon me. Experience has taught me that even those with the best of intentions can commit the most tragic of mistakes where my secret is involved, so I go to great lengths to hide it. It was not a matter of distrust that kept this from you, it was...” he floundered for words, and ultimately sighed. “I suppose in some measure it was about distrust.”

“Honestly, Henry, I’m still just trying to wrap my head around it. It’s impossible.” She rested one hand on the steering wheel, staring out the windshield as if they were going anywhere. “I spent all day thinking you were dead. Now you’re not. And that’s amazing, but it’s not how anything works. Now you’re telling me that you’re immortal--and that you always have been. All the time that we’ve known each other.”

“Yes.”

She frowned in thought. “And before that.... Wait. Hold on. What exactly does ‘immortal’ mean? How long have you-” She cut herself off and studied him again. This time, she was looking at his clothes more than anything else.

He huffed a nervous laugh. “My fashion sense isn’t so outdated, is it?”

“Henry, how old are you?” It was a decidedly serious question.

He forced himself to say the truth. “Two hundred and thirty-five.”

Jo’s breath fled her. He could see it in her pallor, the stillness of her chest, her unblinking eyes. A few moments would be natural, but he counted the seconds, waiting to see if her shock turned into... well, shock.

Thankfully, she blinked, took a new breath. But she had that estranged look again, like she’d never seen him before. Henry felt the cold hand of fear on his chest, as old and familiar as anything he knew.

“I...” She stared. “I don’t know you at all, do I?”

The fear whipped up into a momentary panic, but Henry still had one weapon left in his arsenal: the truth.

He turned as awkwardly toward her as she had toward him, and on impulse alone he took her hand and held it between both of his.

“I have lied to you,” he said as openly as he could, keeping her eyes. “I have lied again and again--you have false conceptions about me that I have put effort into erecting on purpose. But let me be clear, Jo, I have only lied about this. There are technical things you don’t know about me: my parents, my schooling, my storied history with New York, my participation in the war. But I have never lied about what’s important. I have been open and honest with you about who I am, how I feel, and what I believe in. You know what I’ve lost, you know what I have left. You know everything about me, Jo. The names and places and details were changed or omitted entirely, but my heart has always been true.”

After a pause, he realized how those last words had come across. He released her hand and nervously fixed his scarf, sitting up again in his seat.

“What I mean to say is, I am myself. I am not some stranger who’s put on this--this costume, this personality, in order to weasel into your good graces. I am still Henry, and nothing will change that.”

A chill ran down his spine. Dr. Farber had been such a natural, rational human being. Had it all been a lie, or had Adam been at least partially honest in this portrayal of himself? Would it be possible to tell the difference? He liked to think of Adam as being simply insane, but what would happen to Henry, after two millennia?

That was a problem for another day--specifically, a day two thousand years from now. A sickening amount of time. He shoved the thought aside.

It had become deathly quiet. Jo had plenty to consider, and she sat considering it. Henry wished more than anything to know the thoughts poring through her mind, the questions, the conclusions.

Her reaction in this moment would dictate his entire life. Either he would stay and continue his work with her, or he would be benched in the morgue and forbidden from speaking with her. Or he would need to start again somewhere else, somewhere far away. Somewhere she wouldn’t be.

Or, of course, he could be locked up again. Henry wasn’t eager to discover what new tortures had been invented since the last time.

But Jo wouldn’t do that to him, would she?

She let out a breath and rubbed her temples. “My God, Henry, this is insane.”

“I’m well aware.”

“I wish you’d told me. It was terrible, thinking you were dead. I didn’t know what to do with myself, I didn’t know how I could...”

“I’m sorry, Jo.”

“But you _ couldn’t _ have told me. I would never have believed you.”

Henry shrugged and said, with a hopeful expression, “I have photographs.”

“Pictures can be doctored.”

“An entire album of them? The age of the film stock? I believe they would be able to be forensically verified.”

She snorted. “Now you want to bring the entire forensics team into this?”

“We tell them it’s my grandfather.”

“Then how do  _ I _ know it’s not your grandfather?”

He floundered for words for a moment, then saw the half-smile on her face, one slender eyebrow raised. He smiled back. “I suppose you’ve got me there.”

She chuckled, a sharp release of breath, and he chuckled with her. Something unlocked in his chest, a slow, uneasy release of the fear he’d been holding.

“Then, that’s...” Jo’s mouth went slack for a moment, and she shook her head in sheer disbelief. “That’s everything, isn’t it? It’s solved. It’s good.”

“What do you mean?”

She cracked another, wilder, smile, leaning back in her seat. “I’ve been thinking all day that something happened last night, something I need to fix, to deal with. But... this is it. It’s over. You’re alive. There’s nothing left to deal with. Everything’s...”

Jo thought for a moment, turned her head, met Henry’s gaze. When she smiled this time, it was her natural, beautiful, usual smile.

“Everything’s going to be fine.”

The relief was a physical sensation that flowed through him. His eyes watered, a physiological response utterly beyond his control, and his smile grew at least as wide as hers. “Yes, I believe it is.”

But there was yet one box that needed to be ticked.

“Jo, you must promise me that you’ll never tell a soul about this.”

She laughed again, a fuller, louder laugh. “Henry, no one in a million years would believe me. But yes, of course, I promise.”

#

The killer proved not to be anyone at the victim’s school, his circle of friends, nor anyone on his baseball team. The killer was, in fact, Gerald Stevens, an Internet ‘friend’ who had tracked him down and killed him over the matter of a complicated online rivalry. Evidently, the victim--Tony Molson--had considered it a  _ friendly _ rivalry. The killer had been operating under a very different assumption.

The dismemberment apparently had metaphorical relevance to one of the games the two of them had played, but Henry had struggled to comprehend the equivalence. Even Lucas, who played the game in question, could only offer the vague idea that the killer might have been referencing the simple concept of disarming a weapon in combat. It seemed a weak connection, but the killer’s words on the subject were too vitriolic and circumspect to make heads or tails of.

The most important piece of the puzzle was, of course, the handsaw with the victim’s blood and the killer’s prints. Once he realized that they had found the saw that he’d so cleverly buried beneath his neighbor’s fence, the killer had promptly asked for a lawyer.

Now, in the dark evening after the arrest, Jo and Henry strolled together along the sidewalk by the precinct. Henry needed to take a cab home, but he kept letting them drive past unhailed. If Jo noticed these missed opportunities then she didn’t remark on them.

“The one thing I don’t get,” she said, “is why Tony showed up.”

“Hmm?” Henry frowned. “Are you blaming the victim?”

“Of course not. But he was invited out to Central Park at three AM. He went there at that time, alone. Unarmed, despite the explicit threats to his life.”

“Perhaps he felt responsible. Mr. Stevens had threatened lives other than his.”

“He didn’t even bring any weapons.”

Henry offered a shrug. “Stevens had made explicit threats, but still their rivalry had never spilled blood before. The two of them even shared some things in common. He may yet have considered his rival capable of murder, but nothing had actually _ happened _ yet, at least not to him or his friends. So perhaps he thought he could simply talk to him. Or at least stay cordial. Keep his head down and hope nothing comes of it.”

“That’s not exactly a sound plan.”

“No.” He frowned. “But it often isn’t until you see the knife yourself that you understand how very real the threat is, and by then it’s too late. You’re trapped in a speeding car with no driver; you’ve long since forfeit your right to control over the situation; it’s a cascade of chaos, and you’re woefully unprepared. It takes everything you have merely to stay afloat. By the time you have your wits about you, you’ve been forced to compromise everything you once believed in, you’ve nearly lost everything you hold dear, and there’s a man dead at your feet, serving as  _ prima facie _ evidence not only that hopeful ignorance is no method by which to redeem a murderer, but also that control itself is but a mirage of-”

Henry stopped on the sidewalk, buzzy in his ears, and realized that Jo was no longer beside him. She’d stopped a few feet back. He turned toward her, desperately composing himself.

“Excuse me,” he said weakly. “The analogy got away from me.”

Jo stepped up beside him. She looked into his eyes and the noisy backdrop of New York City faded away. 

“What happened,” she said gently. “Your stalker. There’s more to it, isn’t there? There are parts of it you haven’t told me.”

Henry swallowed, hard. “I don’t think you’re ready for that story, Jo. It’s been less than a day since you...”

“Tell me.”

He hesitated, but there was complete confidence in her eyes. She knew enough to know the brand of weird he would be springing on her. She even knew enough not to blame him for lying in the first place.

“The stalker was... is... like me,” he said, quietly. “In other words, he’s still out there. In other words...”

“That wasn’t him,” she breathed.

Henry paused, the words caught on his tongue, waiting for his jaw to soften.

Jo waited with him.

“I didn’t have to kill Clark Walker.” A bare truth, so raw that it hurt merely to consider, let alone say aloud. “Even if he had been Adam, I shouldn’t have done it. But I did. And that’s something I’m going to have to live with.”

Jo took his hand in hers.

Held it comfortably at their side, gazing into him.

“Me, too.”

Her fingers were small between his, cold in the evening air, and her eyes were deep, genuine. Understanding.

“Can I tell you something, Henry? For me...” She smiled slightly, gentle lifts at the corners of her mouth. “You make that a little easier. I just want to be able to do the same for you.”

His hand squeezed hers, but that could only convey a pale shadow of the new way his heart thumped in his chest. He hadn’t felt like this since Abigail had caught him sneaking in through their window all those years ago, since she’d taken him into her arms; since she’d understood him, completely, intimately, immediately.

Jo’s phone rang.

They shared a self-conscious smile, acknowledging the end of the moment. She stepped back and answered the small piece of technology, turning away, providing Henry the time he needed to pull his flustered self together.

“Right now?” she said, a bemused tone in her voice. “Okay. I’m on my way.”

She hung up, turned back to Henry. Fixed him again with that knowing gaze, this time with a full smile.

“How would you like to see a dead body?”

Henry chuckled. Another case, already? A busy day for New York’s murderers. 

Tony’s case had been short, but it’d been... good. After their talk in the car, he and Jo had dived into the case together, like they always did. She’d occasionally asked him a question, but from a curious place rather than an accusing one, and he’d been happy to oblige each time. Being honest--as honest as one can be, in the middle of a police precinct--had felt more liberating than anything he’d done in decades.

Their work didn’t have to end. She’d found out the truth, and yet everything was going to continue as it had been.

Henry grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

**Author's Note:**

> the astute reader might have noticed 2 slight deviations from the original episode. I'm mostly pointing it out now to prove that I saw them too and am not a fake fan


End file.
